The people who know God well - the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found to be an abusive father or a tyrannical mother, but always a lover who is more than we dared hope for. How different than the "account manager" that most people seem to worship. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything.

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God, not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong.